


Is it love?

by Herk



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Complete, Gen, language is a funny thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-22 23:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19139254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Herk/pseuds/Herk
Summary: What does Crowley feel for Aziraphale? What does the angel feel for his demon? Is it love?





	Is it love?

**Author's Note:**

> OK I REALLY reined myself in and stretched out the experience of watching over a whole week. Admire my restraint. But now it's finished and I've got FEELINGS. The show made me ship like there was no tomorrow. Much more than the book did. MUCH more. - Send help.

There simply wasn’t a word for the thing he and the angel shared.

 

How could there be? How could any human language develop the tools to describe the relationship between an angel and his fallen counterpart? Something that had developed over the course of about six millennia give or take, something that started from similar roots (none but another angel could begin to understand what it meant to be born from Her eternal love and no demon but Crowley seemed to remember that particular bit) and grew through shared experience.

 

So of course there was no word.

 

At best a human could hope to experience a century not 60 of them and certainly not all of them with their full mental faculties about them.

 

6000 years at the side of one being - or at least knowing that that other being was out there. Aziraphale more resistant to change than himself, a true constant in an ever changing world.*

 

Human languages were limited, fleeting, and seldom held the poetry necessary to describe even the tiniest fraction of the reality of creation - let alone this particular part of it.

 

The languages of Heaven and Hell might have the scope to describe the vastness of their experience yet neither was personal or versatile enough.

 

An angel had about two million words to describe their love for God and Her glory in all possible ways. Other than that the language quickly fell flat. Hell’s tongue could easily differentiate between the pain caused by a burning splinter under your eyelids and the one caused by a blessed knife cutting said lids into shreds. Everything else was little more that grunts.

 

In Enochian he might most fittingly use “grateful love to the Creator for this particular part of his wonderful creation to exist in a way that I might experience it”. In the Dark Tongue he might touch upon the edges with “the lingering anticipation of pain caused by loss so intense it might cause a physical effect”.

 

Did he love Aziraphale?

 

The answer was derisive laughter and a resounding “No”.

 

Love didn’t even come close to the feelings he held for the person he had known since the day they both gifted humanity with important yet dangerous gifts, one in accordance with his orders the other pretty much against them. The only other soul who understood and cared for those wonderful creatures the same as he did - with a mix of curiosity, a vague sense of guilt, admiration, and sometimes horror.

 

At first they had fought, then bickered, and finally just shared - shared their experience with the only other being able to understand. Aziraphale - who never despised him just for asking questions, Aziraphale - who might cling to the ineffable plan to keep his sanity, yet not-so-secretly had doubts, felt sorrow about some of the things that they saw. Aziraphale who loved not only creation as a whole - like the whole stuck up bunch up there - but all** of it specifically, like old books, good wine, crépes, butterflies, sushi, the reflection of sunlight on a simple creek at dusk, bumblebees. Aziraphale loved bumblebees and may his soul be blessed but after listening to the angel going on about them for half an hour, Crowley couldn’t help but admire those fuzzy bugs himself.

 

OK - so maybe you could say that he did love Aziraphale.

 

As long as you remembered that their love was neither sexual nor asexual, neither romantic nor aromantic, and certainly older than even the idea of platonic. As long as you remembered that “love” was as much of a clumsy attempt as everything else language had to offer.

*

Aziraphale on the other hand knew that he loved Crowley, knew that love was far more complex a concept than his dear demon gave it credit for. It was hardly precise in describing what they had but still.

 

Unlike Crowley the angel didn’t limit himself to so called real languages though and humans had become quite inventive in that department in the last century or so. He wasn’t quite sure whether he would rather describe Crowley as his Cha’lektet or his Cha’trez*** but neither was a bad fit. Meleth held the core and promise of eternity that no real human language could achieve while Parmaq included the sometimes quite volatile aspects of their relation. They might have grown out of that though - mostly. One thing was for sure though he groked Crowley and Crowley groked him.

 

Maybe if human authors had another couple of millennia they would come up with something suitable to describe what they had and even if not, well, labels might be fun to contemplate but by no means necessary.

* * *

  


*Not that either of them was as resistant to change as their respective head offices. Heaven and Hell were basically _immune_ to change and that wasn’t a good thing either.

 

**well most

 

*** Heart-kin and Heart-song respectively. While Crowley did certainly cause his heart to at least hum contently whenever he was close, ‘kin’ held a varied and complex meaning in that particular language that it actually came very close to their situation as an angel and his fallen counterpart.

**Author's Note:**

> Cha'lektet and Cha'trez are Liaden words from the novels of Lee & Miller.  
> Meleth is Quenya, the High Elven language constructed by J.R.R. Tolkien.  
> Parmaq is Klingon developed by Marc Okrand for Star Trek.  
> (to) groke someone or something is a Martian word from the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein.


End file.
